Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

Mrs. Pendyce looked out of the window, but there was
nothing to see save the ha-ha, the coverts, the village
spire, the cottage roofs, which for so long had been
her world.

“George won’t come down here,” she
said.

“George will do what I tell him.”

Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct
that she was right.

Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.

“George had better take care,” he said;
“he’s entirely dependent on me.”

And as if with those words he had summed up the situation,
the philosophy of a system vital to his son, he no
longer frowned. On Mrs. Pendyce those words
had a strange effect. They stirred within her
terror. It was like seeing her son’s back
bared to a lifted whip-lash; like seeing the door
shut against him on a snowy night. But besides
terror they stirred within her a more poignant feeling
yet, as though someone had dared to show a whip to
herself, had dared to defy that something more precious
than life in her soul, that something which was of
her blood, so utterly and secretly passed by the centuries
into her fibre that no one had ever thought of defying
it before. And there flashed before her with
ridiculous concreteness the thought: ’I’ve
got three hundred a year of my own!’ Then the
whole feeling left her, just as in dreams a mordant
sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache, whose
cause is forgotten, behind.

“There’s the gong, Horace,” she
said. “Cecil Tharp is here to dinner.
I asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn’t feel
up to it. Of course they are expecting it very
soon now. They talk of the 15th of June.”

Mr. Pendyce took from his wife his coat, passing his
arms down the satin sleeves.

“If I could get the cottagers to have families
like that,” he said, “I shouldn’t
have much trouble about labour. They’re
a pig-headed lot—­do nothing that they’re
told. Give me some eau-de-Cologne, Margery.”

Mrs. Pendyce dabbed the wicker flask on her husband’s
handkerchief.

“Your eyes look tired,” she said.
“Have you a headache, dear?”

CHAPTER VIII

COUNCIL AT WORSTED SKEYNES

It was on the following evening—­the evening
on which he was expecting his son and Mr. Paramor
that the Squire leaned forward over the dining-table
and asked:

“What do you say, Barter? I’m speaking
to you as a man of the world.”

The Rector bent over his glass of port and moistened
his lower lip.

“There’s no excuse for that woman,”
he answered. “I always thought she was
a bad lot.”

Mr. Pendyce went on:

“We’ve never had a scandal in my family.
I find the thought of it hard to bear, Barter—­I
find it hard to bear——­”

The Rector emitted a low sound. He had come
from long usage to have a feeling like affection for
his Squire.